There’s No Such Thing As Perfect (Until You’re Dead)

Your life is this road, up and awesome one minute, and if only it just stayed that way, but then whoops, you’re down at bottom again. [click photo for credit]There is no such thing as perfect.

There is no such as a perfect child, a perfect hairstyle, a perfect front yard, a perfect job.

There is no perfect score. No perfect performance.

There are no perfect husbands, and no perfect wives. There is no such thing as a perfect dad or mom.

There are no perfect friends, perfect houses, or perfect neighborhoods.

There is no perfect way to spend your time or your money or your thoughts.

Perfect implies completion, and this side of heaven, we are constantly growing, gaining and losing. As long as you are breathing, you aren’t not done yet.

Yet we are always on the lookout for perfect. We tell ourselves it doesn’t exist, yet we are always disappointed when we don’t find it.

When we are on hold or something is taking a long time, we often assume it is because the perfect thing is being prepared for us. We think if we just wait a little longer, the perfect job/husband/wife/house/opportunity will come along.

I have not found this to be true at all. I have only found that God makes good out of bad. He takes a lot of things that are imperfect and makes them beautiful, and eventually, perfect.

He takes an imperfect husband and an imperfect wife and makes imperfect children. They live together in an imperfect house with an imperfect lawn (and a sink full of dishes that I swear we just did an hour ago.) On Sunday mornings, they go to an imperfect church crammed full of imperfect people who sing along with an imperfect band banging out imperfect songs. And then imperfect pastor has the courage to get up and preach an imperfect message.

Then they all drive in their little imperfect cars back to their imperfect lives and somehow, in the middle of the mess, there is a God, piecing together the pretty good, and the not-that-bad, and oh-heck-no. And what do you know? He makes it good. He is so good at that.

Let us not underestimate the value of adversity. This life is not about arriving on some high hill, buying real estate and squatting there. It is not about “making it”. God is not in the comfort business. He is in the gold-making business. It is in the hot and uncomfortable and tight places we find ourselves in that we can have a chance at coming up gold. It’s the dark and invisible, the high-pressure, underground places where the diamonds form.

This side of heaven there is no perfect anything, at least nothing that will last. But if you stay close, Someone who is perfect will keep working on you until you look just like him, and then you will finally get your Perfect after all.

Just posted this today: http://www.dreadlocksandgoldilocks.com
I have been thinking about how we maybe we have twisted the word perfect into meaning something other than it was intended: flawless instead of complete (teleios).